The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.